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Monday, March 1, 2010

Cataclysm Stat Changes and Moonkin

Eyonix made a very big and very good post on the official forums today titled: Cataclysm Stat & System Changes. In the post he provides a lot more detail on the stat changes we will see in Cataclysm. A lot of the information is a rehash of what we heard at Blizzcon and on the forums over the past few months, but there is also quite a bit of new information that we need to ponder. The post is too long for me to quote it all here. I encourage everyone to go and read it on the official forums. I will however go over what I think are the highlights.

Moonkin and Spirit:

If you are a Balance druid or Elemental shaman:

You will still share gear with Restoration druids and shaman.

Your gear will have Spirit on it. It won’t have Hit on it.

You will have a talent that converts Spirit to Hit. We will adjust talents accordingly so that you want about as much Spirit as, say, a warlock wants Hit.

Hit on rings and other such gear will still benefit you.

Raid buffs will no longer boost Spirit, so you shouldn’t find yourself unexpectedly over the Hit cap because of buffs.

First off, no body should be really happy or upset over this announcement. It is currently impossible to say if this is good, bad, or indifferent for moonkin. There aren't enough details to really know how this will affect how we gear and how we DPS and how we gear.

From a macro perspective I think it is the right choice. I would love to not have to deal with Spirit, but I agree that Blizzard can't justify building an entire set of gear drops that on average only one raid member will want. The best solution is to find a way for Moonkin and Resto's to want the same gear. Blizzard hasn't been successful with that in WotLK, but this Spirit = Hit idea is quite interesting and just might work. That said, the devil is in the details, and it will be interesting to see how Blizzard implements this. It has a lot of potential but I also see some pitfalls that I think Blizzard should avoid.

Will Spirit truly be an optional stat? How will they itemize for Spirit on non-tier set leather caster gear? - Currently, spirit is pretty much a standard stat on non tier set caster leather. In all of ICC there is only one leather caster item without spirit that drops off of a boss. If that trend remains then I worry we will have an over abundance of Hit chance just like we do now.

Ghostcrawler, did post later on in the tread and say that some cloth would likely have neither Spirit or Hit that both healers and DPS might want. He also said some the Elemental Tier set will like not have any spirit as well. Assuming these comments hold for Druids as well should alleviate some of my concern. Reforging should make this less of an issue as well.

Will there be spirit on the Moonkin tier sets? - I don't have a problem with the answer being yes, as long as it isn't on every piece and there are quality non tier pieces without spirit.

Will 1 spirit = 1 hit rating for moonkin? If not, what will make up for our lost itemization? How will they account for the base amount of Spirit every player has? - The answers to these questions could have a significant impact on how moonkin scale in Cataclysm. I hope they go with the 1 to 1 conversion, and consider the base spirit we start with to be some thing like balance of power. Some sort of conversion equation would make scaling interesting, because I don't think they could come up with a formula that would be relevant for both Tier 11 and Tier 14. Plus, we would be losing itemization points if both stats keep their current valuation.

Combat Ratings:

Combat ratings - All ratings will be much harder to "cap out" at maximum gear levels. Ratings will be steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs.

I actually really like this announcement. You may remember a post I made a few months ago where I asked if Chill of the Throne went far enough. In that post, I proposed that it should also reduce our chance to Hit, Crit, and the speeds of our casts. This would allow all classes to scale with gear better and prevent some classes from having cap issues.

In the end I got a lot of angry comments and most people were fairly dismissive of the idea, but I stand by it. It seems a little odd to me that the easiest bosses in an expansion are just as easy to hit or crit as the hardest. On top of that, we have to make a lot of effort to hit cap early in an expansion, but in the end of the expansion we can blow past the cap with no effort at all. I like the idea of needing more Hit Rating/Spirit for the higher levels of raiding. In the end I think it should make moonkin gearing a little more interesting then the set of defaults we have now.

Reforging:

Reforging - While these changes will go a long way to making a wider variety of stats more attractive, we understand that sometimes you simply don’t want more Hit Rating on your gear or you’d rather have more Haste than more Crit. In Cataclysm, we are going to give players a way to replace stats on gear as part of the existing profession system. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll be able to convert one stat to 50% of another stat. While some conversions (like converting Stamina to Strength) won’t be permitted, the goal is to let you customize your gear more.

Most of this has been said before, but I think it may be the saving grace of Cataclysm gearing. Think about the gear choices you could make if you convert half the hit on the Tier legs to Crit or Haste. It would open up a whole lot more options on how to gear your moonkin. All of the other items with hit rating would then be an option, instead of ignored due to wasted itemization.

The one thing I did found most interesting about this section was an omission. If I remember correctly, at Blizzcon they said you would only be able to convert the stat to a stat a stat that was not already on the item. Therefore you couldn't change Haste to Crit on the most popular caster gear. I will be pleased if they have really dropped that condition.

Gemming

Gems - We are changing the gem colors of a few stats as a result of these adjustments. For example, Hit is likely to be blue instead of yellow. We'll have more details on this in the future.

No surprise. This had to happen or red and blue gems would become mostly useless to caster DPS. My guess is that Int will become a red gem. This way all of the "power" stats like Agility and Strenght will fall under one gem. Moving hit rating to blue makes sense to combine it with spirit, and I bet that crit rating and haste rating will stay yellow.

Side Note: The updated gear list is on its way. I was given the list weeks ago, but I've recently been slammed at work and news comming out of blizzard. Therefore it is taking me a little longer then expected. Sorry for the delay

31 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Great post like always. I have a question that I think needs some clarification (and it might already have been in either the blue post or previous places). I believe you interpreted, "you’ll be able to convert one stat to 50% of another stat" to mean if you have 100 Spi you can turn it into 50 Spi and 50 Haste. I read that differently. I think it means if you have 100 Spi you take ALL of it and turn it into just 50 Haste. If the later is true than this really looks like a stop gap method until you can get the appropriate haste drop(or whatever you're looking for) without having to waste stats.

I think the one drawback of all this stat merging is dual specs. I play a shadow priest as my main but have 2 alts that are hybrids, an elemental shammy and a lower level moonkin. At the moment I can reuse probably half of my shadow gear as disc, maybe more if I carry hit as a dead stat and abuse the high crit/haste on some of my DPS items. The stat changes will make a difference gearing that off spec in the future especially for spirit desiring classes. Here's hoping disc can ignore spirit :P

I agree to the considerations in the comments above. This whole spirit for healers and moonkin/ele shamans is biased for me.

First of all as it was said, if Holy paladins are going to have exclusive gear (+int +spirit plate), and healing priest will have exclusive gear as well (+int +spirit cloth) it does not seem to fix the current problem of exclusive gear for some classes.

What seems naturally a good solution is exactly what is in place today for cloth classes, which is spirit being an attractive DPS stat.

As a raiding mage, I find absolutely no problem with this, even if spirit is one of the lesser desired stats for a mage.

On a more general note, when it comes to casters, stat homogenization poses an important problem. If melee dps can be separated into 2 big groups, 3 classes requiring Strengh, the other 4 Agility, casters will atm require exactly the same stats, give or take spirit for healing hybrids. Atm there are 5 dps caster specs (boomkin, ele sham, mage, lock, sp) and 4 healer classes(holy pala, resto sham, resto druid, healer priests) more or less sharing the same stat distribution.

The only gap between who uses what will remain the armor type a class can equip, which clearly proves that there are simply too many armor types in the game.

The redundant ones, are clearly mail and leather which atm, due to the large similarity between their users. With the removal of intellect from the requirements of hunters and enhancement shamans, these could simply use the same gear as rogues and ferals currently use. Similarly the mail casters (elemental and restoration shamans) will use, by the looks of it, the same itemization as their druid conterparts.

Therefore I believe it would do the game a great service if one of these gear types would be removed. I arbitrarily suggest that mail should get scrapped. The only other significant difference - armor value - could be simply kept by a passive ability, trainable at level 40 by shamans and hunters that would grant a bonus x% to their armor value.

With this change in place, the class distribution would be a lot more smoother:

In theire post they also stated they want to reduce the amount of armor gap between the armor classes (plate should not be a huge advantage over cloth as it is of today) This means with above poster it would make alot of sense to cut out mail items from game.

Oh and thanks graylo for giving a heads up on that youre working on the gear list.

You may be right. I just reread the post and it seems to lean more towards your interpretation. If that is the case then I think Reforging will be almost entirely useless. I would result in the loss of itemization which is never a good thing. In the end it wouldn't give any more options or customization to gear. The best case senerio is that most players would choose gear that was designed for them and ignore reforging. The only players to use it would be the ones gearing up to convert a bad piece of gear into an ok piece of gear.

The worst case senerio is that We get flooded with a stat we don't want or need (spirit) and loose itemization trying to convert it to something use full.

I hope my original understanding of it is correct, but I'm not so sure.

@Kring

To be fair, the situation with healing priests is not the same as with Moonkin or Ele shaman. Most raids have multiple healing priests. On the other hand most guilds have 1 Moonkin or Ele shaman. Making spirit cloth makes a lot more sense then making hit leather.

@Leigh

Are you sure about that? Who is to say this changes anything for you? At this point we don't have any reason to believe that there will be spirit on every piece of healing gear. In fact, GC said that there may be some Hit/spirit less cloth that both Healers and DPS would want. I don't think this changes your off spec gearing situation.

It is perfect for Druids and shaman though. If I want to pick up a resto spec, it looks like I will have to change very little of my gear.

@Okrane

I don't see what issue you're seeing. This change doesn't really homogenize stats for anyone but Druids and Shaman.

Look at this way. Currently when a piece of caster cloth drops you are competing for it with Spriests, Warlocks, Healing priests, and to some extent Moonkin and Ele shaman. When a ring drops that list expands to resto shaman and holy priests.

The spirit to hit conversion makes sense to bridge healing/dps gear, but has me a little concerned, as does the moving hit cap unless they can adjust the value of hit to be more in line with other stats rather than a binary dominant-til-cap/worthless. Specifically, hit is currently only an end game stat; it hold little value for leveling moonkin, so spirit on pre-raid moonkin gear could be wasted. Similarly, a moving hit cap will devalue top level gear when taking on earlier content. Perhaps this is the interesting gear choices they talk about, and it just means we need to carry a second set of gear to swap in hit/spirit pieces based on content. I'm not sure that sounds like fun; others, including blizzard, may disagree.

Also, on the reforging, I read it as the first commenter did. If it actually works like that, it has limited value since you are downgrading the piece to get better itemization.

My issue with spirit for healers only is that its a step back to pigeonholing gear for a single class/spec.

Lets restrain the problem solely to cloth casters for the moment.

The issue I am seing for CLOTH classes is the following: when an item will have spirit on it, it will automatically be a cloth healer's item, i.e. a healer priest's. Currently spirit is quite attractive for warlocks and even mages get decent benefit from it. This change is a step behind imo, to TBC days with where items with +3x healer +x spellpower were healer only.

This leads to one thing basically: more unwanted drops at some point.There is nothing wrong with keeping spirit as a decent dps stat.

Back to moonkins and leather-mail issue, all I am saying is that blizzard are forced to convert spirit into hit for moonkins and r-shams simply because of their rare armor type, which basically means the same thing as above. If the item drops and the moonkin already has it, the item gets sharded.

Merging the two armor types and making more casters share the same gear will lead to a better distribution of items, without bombastic unintuitive stat conversions like hit-spirit.

Finally to illustrate what I mean I will compare two emblem of triumph items. (again lets only restrain to cloth users for simplicity)

[Band of the Invoker]+sta+int+spi+haste+sp

This ring is what I call good design. Every single cloth caster out there benefits from what the item has to offer. Nothing is wasted. Clearly warlocks and holy priests might gain more than mages and disc priests. But any class can use it effectively.

[Heartmender Circle]+sta+int+crit+sp+mp5

For clothies this is bad design. Out of the 4 specs only healer priest can use this to its full potential. DPS classes have better options out there.

My conclusion is, if spirit becomes a healer only stat, for a dps caster, all healer items will look like this second ring, while they should be looking like the first one.

The one thing I am interested in with these stat changes is how they are going to make cloth pieces no longer desirable for moonkin/elemental shaman other then converting spirit to hit. They had mentioned something previously, but with what they are stating here it doesn't seem that with this change that anything is going to be different in terms of what we will end up going after.

Of course they could do something with armor on the gear within our talents, but other then that I don't see much of a way to chain us to the leather they want us to wear. This is especially true with how things are in the current state of the game with resto druids wanting tons and tons of haste and how balance druids tend to shy away from haste after 400.

Spirit cloth. Seems to me that cloth should have spirit or hit, and talents to convert just like for mk and shammy. The last thing blizz should be doing is creating another Holy Pally where one spec of one class has ANY use for an item.

I also think that losing of mastery because you are wearing 'wrong' armor types is dumb. If blizz made leather gear equal to cloth in all cases +90% of boomkin (and shammies) would be wearing cloth. Instead they should let everyone wear everything, but have a penalty for wearing gear UP the chain. Said penalty would roughly eliminate what you are gaining. IOW If a resto\ele shammy wore some Spell power plate gloves the penalty would reduce his armor such that is would be equal to or slightly less that if he wore identical mail gloves, if such gloves existed. So in PVE loot more usable, smaller loot tables, in PVP (world i'd assume) people can't make mages with tank lvl armor

If you are going from healing --> DPS I think you are in a good place gearwise. Converting spirit --> hit without the need to reforge the gear, potentially carrying too much of course. This is not applicable for shadow priests and has been raised as a concern on the EU forums.

Coming the other direction, DPS --> Healing and you have a different problem especially if you reforged your spirit gear to take more DPS orientated stats. I doubt that Blizzard will allow us reforge gear on the fly? Again coming from a shadow perspective I would be carrying 0 spirit from my DPS gear.

My concerns are similar to what Okrane spelt out in his 2nd post. A spirit piece of gear will be carrying a completely dead stat to me and other cloth casters unless all casters can benefit from the spirit --> hit conversion.

The current system with regards to hit rating seemed fairly un-complex to me. Obtain X amount of hit rating and then avoid getting more. Determining X for your class, talent setup, target level, etc was a bit of a chore but any of the readily available information sites could tell you.

The addition of having Spirit give hit rating does not seem inherently less complex. There's just no arguing in my mind - having two sources for hit rating is more complex than having only one source.

The only way I can see this being okay is if so much hit rating is needed that the cap is literally unreachable except for at the absolute best gear. If it is anything remotely like how it is now where the hit cap is reached with relative ease then Elemental Shaman and Balance Druids are going to be juggling Spirit on their main armor pieces and hit rating on their rings/cloaks/etc back and forth constantly every time a new piece of gear is obtained.

I'm tentatively on-board with the idea of having new tiers of content provide higher stat caps. As long as the caps can be determined with relative ease it should work out okay - aside from potentially needing multiple sets of gear (ie your "cutting edge content" set that pushes hit rating up to the higher cap and your "old raid" set that keeps hit rating lower and maxes other stats) this idea will help the developers to keep gear choices more varied and not design themselves into a corner as tiers progress.

So to recap - spirit -> hit does not seem like it could be less complex, even with an excellent implementation I can't see the number juggling being easier than it is now. And stat caps that scale with tier content sounds reasonable at the outset.

As a druid, this change is very helpful in one way... BAG SPACE! I'm a bit new to the game, so in order to please my guild and get a guaranteed raid spot, I geared up for everything, and had to carry it all with me... 16 pieces of Moonkin gear, 12 pieces of healing gear, 16 pieces of tanking gear, 8 pieces of melee DPS gear, 16 pieces of PvP gear.... Not to mention two stacks of haste pots, a stack of flasks, 2 stacks of MotW reagents, 2 stacks of Fish Feasts, and, being the resident enchanter, 3 stacks each of infinite dust, greater cosmic essence, dream shards and abyss crystals from the g bank... 89 bag slots in total, if I carry my pvp gear with me... With this change that potentially frees up 12 bag slots... so much more room for activities!

Now I can bring my Ogre Pinata, Path of Cenarius, Sandbox Spectral Tiger and all sorts of other goodies to raid!

What they need to do is currently what is in place for locks/mages/priests in respect to spirit, i.e. let spirit give out regen for healers and make it translate into a scalable dps stat for other casters(any of the spellpower, crit, haste, proc% chance, etc can do).

I think they are taking the spirit->Hit a step too SHORT (tricky aren't i).1. They should make it affect cloth wearing classes too so clothies can share too.

2. They should do the reverse for healers, add a Hit -> Spirit talent (or whatever mechanic they use for reverse). Why should it be good for me to poach a a healing ring w/spirit on it but the healers wouldn't be interested in that +hit ring\staff\wand\neck that just dropped

Reforging is not an alternative to item 2. Current 'contested' gear will rarely\never be reforged. All it will do is make more loot 'saveable from DE' and allow people to 'respec' their last tier of gear to off spec roles and maybe rare case roles, like a lock reforging his last tier lvl gear into a massive stam set for tanking a caster like Keleseth

I think the only thing I worry about is having gear reforged. This could cause problems when switching between dual specs Boom to Resto. If you reforged some Spirit on non tier set items for you Boomkin set and then use those same items for your Resto set (they did say Boom and Resto will be sharing the same gear which I assume means non set gear) then you could end up having to have two complete sets of the same gear gemmed enchanted and reforged differently, which I think is a hassle in the long run.

But like Graylo said, until the game comes out and we grind up to lvl 85 and get to end game, we won't really know how this all ends up helping or hurting us. My conclusion so far is that even though the stats on gear are being "simplified", the gear choices will be easier to make, but the optimization of the gear through gemming enchanting and reforging and mastery will make it more "complicated" overall than it is now.

As you've mentioned there are already spirit->something good for dps mechanics in place for a lot of caster classes, Balance Druids included (Improved Moonkin Form). If they want healer gear to be more palatable to Balance Druids and others they need only increase the % granted by these mechanics.

@Kaug of Silver Hand

I agree, they should not make the healer gear more attractive to the dps casters without doing the reverse. But I will stick to my point that spirit -> hit is not going to simplify things, in fact quite the opposite. Hit rating -> spirit for healers seems reasonable. Aside from offensive dispel situations which are more confined to a PVP environment, most healers do not care for hit rating. But Spirit -> hit rating for dps casters looks like it turns hit rating into something that was fairly simple into something more complex.

It should go without saying that I have no monopoly on implementation details and such, only the info that has been released. It might be that this is a great idea and Blizzard will execute it in some way which I haven't thought through. But from what I read so far it doesn't seem quite right.

I think Reforginf will save us all. If it works the way I think (50% of one spirit can be converted to haste, other 50% of spirit don't change), then the system will work.Let's say you get new piece of loot with spirit you don't actually need since you're hit capped already. The solution is simple - reforge the new gear and one or two pieces of old gear. That way you won't have useless stat on your gear and can actually get desirable stat.If reforging actully works that way, moonkins and shamans are in better place then cloth wearing dps since moonkins get something from Spirit, clothies get virtually nothing.

I'm not attempting to downplay the importance of theorycrafting at all. It's important to know how to make the most out of our gear... that's going to make the biggest difference in our damage output anyways.

Theorycrafting and number crunching to me is really important to figure out what should I be doing to maximize my performance.

If the combat rating system is slightly less favorable for us, but when gear drops we roll/bid against 1 resto druid versus two mages, a warlock, and a priest, then we're going to get geared much faster. I'd venture to say that most people playing do not get every single item in the best in slot list before the next content tier comes out.

My point here is that if we have less competition for drops, then on average we'll be showing up to raids with better gear even if those pieces themselves are less favorably itemized.

Regarding your argument about spirit being scalable and hit not, I think they're changing hit to make it always useful:

"I've read several players say that they like to reach their hit cap and then be done with it. But that doesn't really happen because every tier there is more and more hit on gear, forcing you to either swap out some of your excess hit or avoid the new stuff completely. The new model is more that all that extra hit on higher ilevel gear will have a use."

It is some solace that excess hit rating beyond the current hit cap can become useful in a future tier of content when the hit cap is raised, but that does not change the fact that once you cap out for the current content you will not want even a single point more, and you will be juggling two sources rather than just one source to keep your gear tuned around the hit cap.

I disagree with your description that hit cap min maxing is "anal retentive", in current play it is one of the most easy to judge markers of a character that is geared for certain content versus not geared enough, or just flat out uninformed (ie 100 over the cap, etc).

The point stands that, at least as far as we can tell now, a Spirit -> hit rating conversion will make what was a relatively simplistic gear tuning (one stat, one cap) into something more complex (two stats, one cap per content tier). Likewise it makes the valuation of Spirit go from a flat line to much more of a binary high-value low-value like hit rating currently is.

The ability to get the same gear for Balance and Restoration and have it be useful for both I don't think was ever in question, in fact it is one of their stated goals. The debate is that their method of making the pieces attractive to Balance Druids is not in line with their stated goal of simplifying stat choices.

As always, we are theorycrafting based on what information we see before us. It is possible hit caps will be so high that both spirit and hit rating will be desired at all levels, or perhaps they will remove the Spirit->Spellpower conversion on Improved Moonkin Form such that both stats are almost literally the same in terms of valuation. There are a number of outcomes, but barring speculation on what we cannot know, what I read now does not sound like a step towards simple.

"My point here is that if we have less competition for drops, then on average we'll be showing up to raids with better gear even if those pieces themselves are less favorably itemized."

This is something I do not want. What this says to me is we get an advantage at the start of a content tier because of less competition, but at the end of that tier we get sat out because everyone else now has their better itemized gear.

Reminds me vaguely of feral at the beginning of TBC, gear was provided easily through quests and things were not given a chance to progress to endgame content before forums were flooded with cries of nerf druid. End result was a hard nerf, and it took until sunwell before ferals got back to where they were statwise at the start of TBC, and they still had to put the sunwell radiance in to balance it out.

If we cannot help but to have such low DPS that we're losing raid spots to pures, then I cannot help but to agree that the way Blizzard has set it up is broken.

But I just don't see us losing spots because our gear itemization sucked.

The bottom line to me is that my monthly subscription obliges Blizzard to make all levels of content I care to participate in accessible to me, provided I have the level of skill and time investment required. This means that if I'm in all ilvl 264 gear, a raid with dpsers equal to my damage output can manage to clear heroic icc25 if we have the skill. Likewise, if 5 other dpsers can do the same amount of damage as me, then we should have enough damage output to clear icc10.

I would never join a raiding guild that required my dps to exceed what was required to comfortably clear the content.

I don't think they're making gear choices complex at all; I think if something drops it'll be obvious it's an upgrade, and they're going to keep caps higher to make sure we don't have to deal with "well, I spirit is only worth 1.53 points of dps once I reach 800, so this weapon is only a 0.23% dps increase. At least that's what I've read and heard from GMs.

Again, they want to make our gear decisions much simpler.

Perhaps my more casual philosophy is just incompatible with a pure theorycrafter min/max perspective. The reason I'm not that in to making every item stat count as much as possible is because my gear has never been the reason I can't clear content. It's always one of two things: either I don't really get the fight yet, or other people in the group don't really get the fight yet.

"Raid buffs will no longer boost Spirit, so you shouldn’t find yourself unexpectedly over the Hit cap because of buffs." and "Combat ratings - All ratings will be much harder to "cap out" at maximum gear levels. Ratings will be steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs."

Until we know more about the conversion rates and new caps we shouldn't get too worked up about it, like most have said. Spirit > hit may end up helping us in the long run.

I wonder why Blizzard is not going to separate Armor from items. That would be an easy way.Example:items are "armor-less" and (Tailors), LW, BS offer craftable armor enhancements.In this way people can upgrade their armor separately to their max class specific value.In this way you could significantly reduce the loottable w/o reducing item variability.

I don't find the current situation with cloth gear fair for healing priests. If it has spirit on it, every mage, warlock, and spreist wants it too, but if it has hit only the dps specs can use it.

I realalize hit is such an overabundance that nobody really wants hit pieces in late tiers. It just seems that to be fair if spirt->some dps stat that hit-> to some healing stat, probably regen.

There's still the problem of 1 spec using sp plate. I sometimes wonder if instead of converting ret to use str plate, they should have had them use sp plate. It would have helped allieviate some of the stiff competion I see with plate and get around that ret doesn't really want arm pen. I guess then they would have had the same problem of hit & mp5 though.